Anarch Steve

Tried to come up with a clever name, but the deck wants to be called Anarch Steve so let's just go with that for now.

While playing through Terminal Directive, I contemplated how effective Anarch goodies might be out of Steve Cambridge considering his creative way of recurring cards. Through testing I've found, though, that you rarely should give the Corp a choice between your Anarch goodies and other cards because they will ALWAYS get rid of your Parasite. As a result, I decided that 2x Deja Vu made incredible sense, packaged with plenty of Datasuckers and the Criminal virus of the year: Tapwrm.

The cards you do wind up recurring with Steve's ability are usually some combination of Inside Job/Spear Phishing/Forged Activation Order/Sure Gamble and breakers when you can. As it turns out, recurring those cards are actually pretty powerful. Being able to play Inside Jobs with less than perfect information feels even better when you almost guarantee that you will be able to play it again in a few turns. Even getting back a Sure Gamble can make the difference in keeping up with a Corp's econ. You'll only want to try and get a Siphon back when you have at least two in your heap for the same reason you never try to get Parasite back.

The deck plays like your regular aggro-Criminal deck: you want to rush to get points before the Corp can deploy their strategy. You'll notice that we don't run much in the way of damage prevention (Crash Space and Aaron Marron offer minimal support) but the goal should be to win out before the risk of flat lining overwhelms you. I've had some success against Net Damage decks by just treating most of my deck as hit points and only installing necessary cards which are few in that type of matchup. Asset Spam is a problem but you should be rich enough to snipe a few key pieces as they're setting up. Once again, you just have to rush before their board state becomes impenetrable. Timing your Siphon plays and Parasite kills are key to deal with those Corps.

Glacier matchup is tough as well, but if you have enough money, Steve's breaker suite isn't the worse thing. You can supplement with Datasucker/Parasite to get rid of the shittier ice to deal with (looking at you Vanilla), but you should also feel empowered to use the sweet bypass ability on these new breakers at key moments. I've won a few games by timing out just when to simply bypass that pesky Fairchild 3.0 when the Corp thinks they've got me locked out.

The deck is far from optimal and I've yet to try it in a tournament setting, but if you're looking for a fun way to play Steve and his breaker suite, I think this could be a decent shell to toy around with.

Deck name suggestions are encouraged. Thanks for reading!